The paranoia over the dangers of mercury is now out of hand.

The paranoia over the dangers of mercury is now out of hand. That it can't be used at Bletchley Park to recreate something as special as the storage delay simply borders on the hysterically absurd. Even if the new bogeyman is mercury, there's no reason why special precautions and enclosures cannot be used to make it environmentally acceptable. It seems to me there's very little point in recreating this computer if this not authentic. Why bother at all? May as well make it out of plasticine if it isn't done correctly.

In the lax days of a few decades ago when there was almost no regulation over mercury, it was used in large quantities in industry and one rarely heard of anyone getting mercury poisoning. If you walked into a railway rectifier room of about 40 years ago, you'd see gallons of it inside huge mercury-arc rectifiers all glowing with an eerie violet glow. One never heard of utter disaster when one broke (which they occasionally did). Whenever I entered a Hg-arc room (an occasional experience), I was always much more concerned about the high voltage than being poisoned by the Hg.

Sure, this element in metallic form can be dangerous if not handled correctly but handling it is now well understood. Moreover, professions that were reckless with it had long since gone by the end of the 19th C. (Making Daguerreotype photos whilst breathing volatile Hg fumes, or being a 'mad' hatter and curing pelts with Hg were professions seemingly devoid of even the most elementary precautions.)

Metallic mercury isn't that dangerous if handled with care, and I've a mouthful of mercury amalgam fillings to prove it, some of which I've had for many decades--yet I'm still sufficiently compos mentis to write this. ;-) Remember too, if you'd caught syphilis before the War then you'd have little choice other than to ingest mercury. With luck, and if you'd successfully managed the thin line between Hg OD and an insufficient amount, then it might have eventually cured you.

Mercury is still used in the form of thimerosal as a preservative for vaccines; we think its toxicity is sufficiently low that its use outweighs the perishing of vaccines. Until recently, the antiseptic Mercurochrome was commonly available (and I still have a bottle of it).

When I was at high school, we had large jars of mercury and one of the most memorable experiments was to try and push one's hand to the bottom of the jar (Hg about 10cm deep). It's is quite a challenge I can assure you. (We did it outside and scrubbing with soap afterwards was the order of the day.)

That said, some organic compounds of mercury are very dangerous, specifically the (mono) methylmercury cation, CH3Hg+, and its very nasty and extremely toxic brother, dimethylmercury (CH3)2Hg. Monomethylmercury+ is of concern because in this organic form it can enter the food chain and become a cumulative neurotoxin. This happened about 50 years ago in Minamata Bay in Japan with horrific consequences for the local fish-eating population. The Hg entered the bay as effluent in the CH3Hg form 'dumped' by an irresponsible industry.

(BTW, Those whose chemistry has not deserted them completely will know that if you're using metallic mercury in some industrial process it won't suddenly start producing organic forms and become super toxic (unless that process is a specialised chemical one). If you're careless, you might suffer the effects of the metallic mercury, but in the event you were tested and found to ALSO have traces of CH3Hg in your system then it almost certainly won't have come from your exposure to the metallic form. Almost certainly, it'll have come from top-predator fish that you've been eating. Outside the lab, CH3Hg is usually produced when microbes convert metallic Hg to the very dangerous organic form which fish accumulate.)

Perhaps I've written an overly long rave but I've done so because I'm becoming increasingly concerned about how timid and overprotected our society has become in recent years. Not only are we producing a society full of people who are terrified of anything 'chemical' but also the hands-off approach to chemicals is deskilling the nation. I now know people who have never seen liquid mercury in their life, and who are terrified of the thought of coming across any. Ban it from schools and this is what happens. It's tragic really, it's no wonder Asia, without such hang-ups, is wiping the floor with us.

We never seem to get regulations with the correct balance. With respect to hazardous chemicals, we've gone from having almost no regulations 50 years ago to the other extreme where we can't even use mercury in this historic Bletchley Park computer. It's just crazy, much of the blame has to be leveled at the damn postmodernists who infiltrated our education system some 20/30 years ago and subverted it with anti-science rhetoric. Now we've a large core of the population who are deeply suspicions of science.

Finally, my position is not for tight but rather sophisticated regulation. For instance, I'd greatly tighten the regulations for handling mercury in schools than from the time when I was there but in no way would I ban it. Otherwise, how else are kids ever going to get experience when there's nothing to get hands-on experience with.

[Oh, BTW, at school we even had samples of metallic uranium and its ore as well as alpha and beta radioactive sources that we used for proper hands-on experiments (such as the different blocking properties of various materials when exposed to alpha particles). Being the school's electronic nerd, I even built my own Geiger-Müller counter. If I hadn't had access to these radioactive sources then there's no way I would have tackled such a project. At 14, it felt like a great achievement. For kids, hands-on, messy, noisy science is essential; theory is just not sufficient.]

Going to be faster...

than any modern machine running vista.